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Successful settlement of Syrian refugees crucial, Goodale says

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says it’s vital that resettled Syrian refugees are successfully integrated into Canadian cities, not just from a social and cultural perspective, but from a public safety perspective.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said one of the priorities set out in his ministerial mandate letter was to boost efforts to counter violent extremism. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo)

ST-ANDREWS-BY-THE-SEA, N.B.—Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says it’s vital that resettled Syrian refugees are successfully integrated into Canadian towns and cities, not just from a social and cultural perspective, but from a public safety perspective.

“It’s extremely important that they settle well and successfully and we and the settlement agencies and the provinces and the cities need to work at that to make sure that it is successful. If we, being Canada, are going to maintain our very successful efforts so far at pluralism, at diversity and inclusion . . . then we’ve got to be among the best in the world at counter-radicalization.

“Because if we fail to detect the causes or the signs, or we don’t have the capacity to intervene at the right point, and then don’t make the intervention successful, then those values of openness and the plural nature of the country will be in jeopardy,” he said. “And that’s the very essence of Canada, so we’ve got to do outreach and counter radicalization very well.”

Three months into his job in charge of Canada’s national security agencies, which have been intimately involved in the resettlement project, Goodale says one of the priorities set out in his ministerial mandate letter was to boost efforts to counter violent extremism.

At this time, he will say only that “a lot more attention” must be paid to outreach efforts, and the question of increasing funding for such programs and research into what leads people to become radicalized will be answered “a ways down the road.”

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As the federal government says it will meet its revised target of bringing in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February, the concerns of federal ministers involved in the project are shifting to ensuring their well-being and integration into Canada.

At a Liberal cabinet retreat this week in New Brunswick, Immigration Minister John McCallum said the challenge is not if the target number will be met, but to find places for them to live and help them find jobs.

In the face of incidents like the fire-bombing of a Peterborough mosque and the pepper-spraying of a Syrian refugee group in B.C., Goodale was asked by the Star whether he worried about the ability of some Syrian refugees to integrate and the issues of radicalization that might arise in communities where Muslim youth may feel isolated or disenfranchised.

Goodale stressed the importance of outreach, and research efforts “to identify what contributes to radicalization, how the process works.” He said a national cross-cultural roundtable is a useful forum for different faith leaders, police agencies and social service agencies to work together. But he said there is a definite need for more such groups on a local level. There are some scattered across Canada, often led by local Muslim leaders, he said.

But it’s a “massive project,” he admitted.

It’s not the only one on his plate.

Goodale said the Liberals will move by June to create a parliamentary committee to oversee national security activities along with new review mechanisms — possibly whole new offices — to scrutinize the work of Canada’s frontline anti-terror agencies.

But detailed amendments to the Conservatives’ hastily passed national security law, known as Bill C-51, will not likely be ready until next fall, he said.

In opposition the Liberals supported C-51 but promised to amend it to better balance individual rights and public safety. Their election platform promised to boost national security oversight and to refine the definition of terrorist propaganda, the “no-fly” list, and safeguard civil dissent and lawful advocacy.

However, Goodale, the minister in charge of national security agencies like the RCMP, CSIS, and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), said his first order of business is to create a watchdog committee of parliamentarians who would serve as a check and balance on those forces.

Canada is the only partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence network (which includes Britain, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia) that doesn’t have some form of parliamentary review.

Goodale said he found a fact-finding trip last week to Britain and France “very valuable” but believes Canada will have to devise its own unique regime of oversight to address what he called “clear gaps and holes” in the current system.

“You need several layers of security review,” Goodale said. “The parliamentary component by itself would not be sufficient.”

It is, nonetheless, the first priority. Goodale said he will consult broadly about whether it ought to have real-time oversight powers, or an after-the-fact review body with access to all classified top secret material.

Goodale said he’s only begun his analysis, but is convinced “there are clear gaps and holes in the system in terms of some dimensions of our security work . . . . The CBSA doesn’t have any review mechanism at all.

“It will take some reflection, to come to a clear definition of what we would expect the parliamentarians to do, what a remodelled and potentially enhanced SIRC would do, do we need an extra addition,” like Britain’s independent reviewer, he said, “to ensure the security agencies are properly respecting their mandates.”

In Canada, gaps have long been identified by judicial commissions of inquiry, the federal auditor-general, other review bodies and a previous Liberal government, though experts and judicial inquiries have differed on how to close them.

Goodale said he was struck by two aspects of the British system: that there is a national security review office that is an independent reviewer of security legislation, and that there are tribunals made up jointly of sitting politicians and sitting judges.

Academic critics have said the system of review and oversight in Canada is in “disarray” and were dismayed when C-51 increased the anti-terror powers of CSIS and the RCMP, but left most of the job of watching how they are used to cabinet ministers and the courts.

Craig Forcese and Kent Roach, authors of False Security, the definitive analysis of C-51, support the idea the idea of giving parliamentarians a review role and access to classified information, but not a real-time command-and-control role in operational decisions of national security agencies. They wrote: “there is considerable reason to believe that legislators who are brought into the operational tent are tainted in their subsequent ability to exercise effective review of executive government action.”

The Conservatives criticized Goodale and the Liberal government for unilaterally naming MP David McGuinty to chair the eventual parliamentary oversight committee, and failing to include opposition representatives on the fact-finding trip to Britain. But Goodale dismissed their criticism.

“We’re at the very beginning of the most extensive consultation process on national security that the country has probably ever seen, so for the Conservatives to be critical is hypocritical in the least because they consulted about nothing.”

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